Watch movies with your mates in the virtual reality Oculus Cinema

The Oculus Cinema VR experience will be getting an update which adds multiplayer and social features.

The Oculus Cinema, as the name suggests, is a virtual reality experience that puts you in a virtual or home cinema and lets you watch films on a virtual screen. However, this can be a lonely experience with rows of virtual empty seats, as is often the way with VR.

The new update means you'll be able to watch films in the virtual cinema with your friends and even see them sitting next to you in the virtual world.

Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey spoke to Road to VR about the new features, which will be arriving in the coming months. We can expect "things like avatar systems, being able to communicate with people over long distances… rather than just local multiplayer, but having actual long distant multiplayer as well."

Facebook, the social media beast and owner of Oculus, also sees a social future to VR, with Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying: "Ten years ago it was text. Now it's mostly visual and photos, then primarily video and we're seeing huge growth there, but that is not the end of the line. Immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video."

So we'll soon be able to go to the movies with friends from around the world, without leaving our sofas. How bizarre. Oculus Cinema is already available on Samsung's Gear VR, and will launch with the consumer edition of the Oculus Rift when it's released in 2016. It's not clear yet whether the social functions will work across the Rift and Gear VR yet or whether Rift users will be sat in the virtual equivalent of the Odeon's gallery.